This week, Quanta kicked off a five-part series on science and big data, starting with Imagining Data Without Division. Part 2: A Digital Copy of the Universe, Encrypted. As physics prepares for ambitious projects like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the field is seeking new methods of data-driven discovery. Part 3 is my article on the Mathematical Shape of Things to Come. Scientific data sets are becoming more dynamic, requiring new mathematical techniques on par with the invention of calculus. Part 4 and Part 5 will appear next week.

Related: Big Data is revolutionizing 21st-century business without anybody knowing what it actually means. Now computer scientists have come up with a definition they hope everyone can agree on.

When the Doppler Effect gets twisted. “In 1981, a chemist discovered that when light is circularly polarized, the polarization changes its frequency. What’s more, if the light then hits a spinning object, a rotating reflective surface or a spinning gas cloud, the light’s polarization and frequency changes again.”

New York Times Opinion Column by Columbia University philosopher Stephen Asma Equates Higgs, Genes, Evolution with Feng Shui, Qi, and Turtle Blood. This is, of course, nonsense.

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? Long, thought-provoking rumination by former Yale physics major Eileen Pollack explores why she opted out of physics graduate school: “I wanted to understand why I had walked away from my dream, and why so many other women still walk away from theirs.”

When it comes to popularizing science, women have been left on the sidelines as a laddish, macho presenting culture takes over, argues Sue Nelson. “Nowadays, it appears you can’t do mainstream popular science unless you’re fishing from the same pool of men. Unfortunately, the overall effect is a Top Gear for science, with blokes chatting about planets instead of Porsches.” Jen-Luc Piquant rather likes Top Gear. And Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. As does Nelson. But it’s a thoughtful piece, and a valid point.

"It might look like gibberish to you, but every term in the analytic formula for the gg → ggg scattering amplitude told us something." -- Lance Dixon.

Feynman diagrams are like grains of sand. The physics behind this year’s Sakurai Prize for new techniques for calculating amplitudes. “An “amplitude” is the fundamental thing one wants to calculate in quantum mechanics — the probability that something happens (like two particles scattering) is given by the amplitude squared. ”

New Space Beer is Brewed With Real Moon Dust. “Celest-jewel-ale is made with lunar meteorites that have been crushed into dust, then steeped like tea in a rich, malty Oktoberfest.”

Peter Higgs profile: the self-deprecating physicist is revered by his peers. Particle physicists speak of admiration for man who outlined what came to be known as Higgs mechanism.

Particles and the People Who Love Them: Documentary Shows the Human Side of the Large Hadron Collider. “Particle Fever shows the human drama behind the physics drama in a way that is hard to experience if you weren’t actually there in the control room when the accelerator beams were first turned on, or in the great lecture hall when the conclusive data were first projected on the wall.”

Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In: Timothy Leary, video game designer. “At a reception celebrating the opening of the archive to researchers, the library displayed a monitor showing a continual loop of samples from the dozen or so games Leary developed in the 1980s.”

Nothing in the World is Solid. “One branch of science, rheology, has invented a dimensionless number. It’s called the Deborah Number, and it is meant to quantify the motto of the science: “Everything flows.” Put another way, everything in the world has liquid properties. Even mountains.”

Dan Grayber, an artist based in California, builds intricate structures that do nothing but hold themselves up. He’s currently showing a collection of pieces at Johansson Projects in Oakland, California.

What Would Happen If You Got Zapped By The Large Hadron Collider? It would burn a hole through you—and then some.

Watch My Shorts: Science is front and center in these film shorts: Accidental Painting, Flatland: the Movie, and Flatland 2: Sphereland.

In Matt Kenyon’s “Supermajor,” oil appears to flow upward against gravity from a puddle into a can. This optical illusion is a stroboscopic effect similar to the one that makes car wheels seem to rotate backwards.

In Love with Geometry: “giving a new life to the study of surfaces and curves we can actually see.”

String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design. “From Australia to Germany to Maui, there is something of an explosion under way in the use of science and new materials to test the limits of instrument making.”

How to make a Jedi lightsaber. You will need a vacuum chamber, various lasers, some rubidium atoms and a firm grasp of quantum nonlinear optics. (Star Wars made light sabers look easy.)

Photograph: Courtesy of Adrianus Aria/California Institute of Technology/Materials Research Society/Science as Art Competition

Let a thousand tiny nano flowers bloom: just one of this month’s collection of nano-imagery featured by the Guardian‘s Rachael Stubbins, which also includes minuscule gold stars, and crystal layers that could replace silicon as the building blocks of the information age.

“As the Cold War hovered over the United States, a “Giant Atomic Bomb” toy was marketed to children with little futuristic, robotic-looking figures emblazoned on the sides of plastic missiles in ominous colors of yellow, black, and a hazy green that seemed to match the bomb shelter signs prevalent across the country.”

Nature speaks in algorithms; new book suggests that computation has always been the dominating force on earth. Related: Finding the Beauty in Math.

When the Large Hadron Collider Is Too Small. “Right now, the leading proposal for a post-LHC project is the International Linear Collider, a pair of 11-kilometer-long electron guns pointing at each other as if in a subatomic duel.”

IBM’s Watson Proves Itself a Top Chef with a recipe for Swiss-Thai Fusion Quiche. As IBM launches research collaboration with four universities and institutes, it shows how Watson can build recipes.

Adding this to my Christmas wish list: Zombie Cribbage, An Undead Version of the Classic Card Game.

Finally, oneTesla is a Kit For Building Your Own Musical Tesla Coil that can play MIDI songs. Comes with a 64-page instruction manual and the caveat that it’s a pretty advanced science project. But still…

About the Author: Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer who loves to indulge her inner geek by finding quirky connections between physics, popular culture, and the world at large. Follow on Twitter @JenLucPiquant.